Saturday, May 31, 2008

You know, there is a big thing we should be getting out of this party tonight, and that is the Democratic National Committee is not somehow controlled by the Clintons. Not by the Clinton campaign any more. We may have started this campaign believing that the Clinton campaign controlled, but this is Barack Obama's party now. He's already been winning the outside game, he now won the inside game. Yes it's true that Harold Ickes can threaten this stuff about the credentials, but Don Fowler really did signal today by being for the Michigan compromise that, "Guys, it's over."

Outside of the RBC meeting in DC today, some Clinton supporters showed their true colors.

Are these women Republican plants, or do they really think this way? If they are for real, they're doing a terrible job at dispelling the myth of women being inherently irrational. What could be more irrational than voting against all of your principles and choosing your opponent whose platform and ideology is anathema to everything you stand for, over your competitor from the same party whose platform and ideology is nearly identical to yours?

Would Hillary supporters so willingly do their best to hand over the the future of America to John McCant, which would ensure at least another four years of disastrous Bush-style governing, the appointments of many more conservative judges and one or two justices, further erosion of our civil liberties, relinquishing even more control of our country to corporations, increased environmental devastation, and a possible complete regression of women's reproductive rights?

If Clinton supporters would rather do this just to keep Barack Obama out of the White House, then that would make Clinton supporters useless to the Democratic Party, and they should be driven out. I assert that any Clinton supporter who has threatened to vote for McCain should be driven out of the party.

If you know of any Clinton supporters, you should call them out and renounce them. That kind of behavior is despicable.

One last note: I must say that the behavior of the Clinton supporters at the RBC meeting today has been perfectly consistent with the behavior of Clinton supporters I have encountered while campaigning for Obama. These people have been horrible, they have been exceedingly rude, they have been mean and nasty to the core. Voting for Hillary Clinton means endorsing this very type of sickening behavior. Who wants four years of that?

After Clinton drone Harold Ickes said Hillary advised that they would reserve the right to take the FL/MI delegate matter to the credentials committee at the convention, along with [her] horde persistently disrupting the RBC meeting with their shrill chants and cries of "DENVER! DENVER!" how can anyone expect that Clinton will not continue with her scorched earth strategy?

Chuck Todd and a few others on the net seem to think that she won't, but I think Rachel Maddow called it squarely. "Stepping back from the trees," she sees Clinton's slash and burn forest. She takes Ickes's threat as credible, and so do I. Clinton has been given a long leash in this campaign, and every time someone gives her the benefit of the doubt, they have to eat their words. This time is no different. There are plenty of missiles left in Clinton's win-at-all-costs arsenal.

The DNC, RBC, and Obama campaign wanted only one objective coming out of this meeting today, and that was to begin uniting the party. Clinton supporters had zero interest in this objective ahead of the meeting and after, as was clearly evidenced by their abhorrently disruptive behavior inside the hall, and outside.

Clinton and her supporters want nothing short of Obama NOT becoming president. If you don't believe me, see my next post.

I'm taking advantage of a new comments feature by a third-party group called DISQUS. It should make commenting easier, and more interesting. So feel free to leave your comments about my posts, positive or negative.

UPDATE: Nice thing about the new feature is you don't have to bother with those stupid CAPTCHA word verifications

When under pressure, McCain has a habit of making sweeping blanket statements. Criticized for his stance on the 21st Century GI Bill last week, McCain falsely claimed he “received the highest award from literally every veteran’s organization in America.” In December, McCain made the blatantly false assertion that the he is “the only one the special interests don’t give any money to.”

Hilarious. A blog where you can post your neuroses. I was going to post one, but I seem to share similar neuroses with lots of others. I need to read through them all to see if I have any unique behavioral ticks.

As I mentioned in an earlier post about knowing Floridians who did not vote in the primaries knowing their votes wouldn't count, now there's evidence that as many as a million voters did not turn out to vote. Check it out:

Bottom line: As these numbers clearly show, if these two states had held recognized contests with turnout in line with the best-fit curve for the other states, it seems likely that many more voters would have turned out -- possibly as many as one million in Florida, and over half a million in Michigan -- and we simply can't know how those people would have voted. These simple facts render both contests, especially Michigan, seriously dubious as actual measurements of the will of each state's electorate.

What does Hillary and her horde have to say about them? (Deafening silence).

A compromise has been reached apparently, thanks to the grace and magnanimity of Barack Obama. But if there were any sense of decency left in this country, none of the FL votes would count.

Friday, May 30, 2008

Arizona Sen. John McCain refused to apologize yesterday for his use of a racial slur to condemn the North Vietnamese prison guards who tortured and held him captive during the war.

"I hate the gooks," McCain said yesterday in response to a question from reporters aboard his campaign bus. "I will hate them as long as I live."

McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent five years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, was questioned about the language because of a story last month in the Nation magazine reporting his continued use of the slur.

I can understand why he of all people would say something like this, and that very reason is why he should NOT be the next president. How can anyone expect someone like this to be a responsible leader when he can't even control his mouth?

If this interesting post is to be believed - and it sounds pretty good to me - McCain being the GOP front-runner has less to do with his appeal than it has to do with the other former GOP candidates being much less appealing.

The Arizona Senator looks a lot like a Phoenix rising from the flames of what appeared to be a vanquished campaign.But what many in the media are overlooking is that his success and ultimate coronation as the Republican nominee was not a result of his ability to convince those both within as well as outside his party that he's the best man for the job.Rather, his rise to the top was born out of a pile-up that took the top-tier out of contention.Whether he'll be able to parlay that success into the White House is yet to be seen.

My bet is that the more people get to know Barack Obama, the more they like him. The more they get to know McCain, the more they see he's just a charlatan with a supportive mainstream media helping to keep alive his "maverick" charade.

I've been ranting about this since before 2000 when W. was stealing his way into office, and there is little doubt that the major media outlets have been gradually whithering and wasting away, becoming self-mocking caricatures resembling nothing more than tabloids. As the furor over Scott McClellan's new book has brought this issue to the forefront again, it is as important as ever to ask where have all the journalists gone?

It is safe to say that they have left all of the major media outlets, but there were a few truth tellers out there all along, and they were to be found in the Knight-Ridder and McClatchy families (McClatchy bought Knight-Ridder in 2006).

Apart from the truly hard working folks in the blogosphere who I'd say work much harder than most big media journalists for a fraction of the reward and an even smaller level of reach and exposure, there are a few places where you can find true investigative journalists. Here are my recommendations for old school gumshoes:McClatchy DC Bureau Christian Science Monitor Greg Palast

Thursday, May 29, 2008

Clinton said Michigan wouldn't count, after signing the pledge to not campaign there, but choosing to keep her name on the ballot.

As for Florida, I personally know Floridians who didn't bother to vote in the FL Democratic primary because they knew their vote would not count. So if Hillary or her supporters want to talk about disenfranchised voters, make sure those (non)voters who were already disenfranchised get considered too. The second important part about Florida is that the legislative body - and some of its DINOs like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz - didn't bother to protest the GOP governor's plan to move up the primaries. If FL has a beef with their votes not being counted, they take it out on your closeted gay governor Crist and the Republicans in the legislature.

"I never lobbied anybody! What I do is make ads and try to involve people in the process, people outside the halls of legislatures or city councils, to get involved in public issues. What lobbyists do is go behind closed doors and try to influence lawmakers sometimes with implied promises of support for their campaign and so on, It is fundamentally different. I have never lobbied a politician on behalf of a client in my life. And I certainly have never talked to Obama about any client. It is a red herring put up by a campaign that is being run by the most powerful corporate lobbyist in Washington in Charlie Black and being managed by a corporate lobbyist.

"I think that Senator McCain talks about reform and cleaning up Washington and cleaning up the budget and so on. I think there has to be a recognition that one of the reasons Washington is the way it is, and one of the reasons we have the problems we have, and one of the reasons there is a ten thousand page tax code and budget that is larded with pork and so on, is that you've got an army of corporate lobbyists patrolling Capitol Hill who are working relentlessly to put that stuff in. and if you don't recognize that you are missing a big part of the story."

"He is a rock star. It's fantastic" "I love what he is saying about education." "I don't think he will win Florida.....but he will win in Ohio and the election". "I am anxious to meet him." "I want to see if he will walk the walk."

He goes on to say about John McCant:

"McCain is a friend of mine. He's a patriot. But he's unpredicatble. Doesn't seem to know much about the economy. He has been in Congress a long time, and you have to make a lot of compromises. So what's he really stand for?... I think he has a lot of problems."

Just starting with the most obvious corporations which might benefit from war, I was able to map out these connections. Granted, this map is relying on 2004 data, and many corporations have consolidated or re-branded since, but you can easily see how individuals who sit on boards together can profit from war.

But some in the press still don't get it... like Anderson "Tool Shed" Cooper.

Why does Anderson Cooper sound so surprised? It's not like he wasn't likely pushed the same way by CNN executives. Either that, or he was willful about his "blowing sunshine up our asses" reporting that helped lead us into Iraq.

The only thing shocking about the revelations in Scott McClellan's new book is that the press are the ones who seem surprised that Bush and Rove and the rest of BushCo have been lying to us. Big fat fucking DUH!

It doesn't take a leap of imagination to understand why certain corporate executives would take advantage of the madness - or dare I say sickness - that infected this country after 9/11, and drive us into another war. When you consider that NBC is owned by GE, and GE makes A LOT of military equipment (and medical equipment too), why wouldn't they push for war? War means bigger sales and contracts of that military equipment. Maimed and dismembered soldiers mean more chances for medical equipment sales, or more importantly, R & D on equipment in development.

Follow that same logic as it applies to other media outlets controlled by big corporations with a vested interest in military or medical equipment. Take a look at who sits on the corporate boards of media outlets and corporations with ties to the military here: www.theyrule.net

If there was any true justice in the world, the American media would be tried for war crimes along with the Bushies. Alas, 'tis only a dream.

I will mercilessly mock everyone short of a physical handicap who I see riding one of these stupid things:

0-60 in 4 seconds? Phhht. Top speed 110 mph? Whatever. Safe? If you want safe, buy a Volvo. I could see this being fun for about one ride, sort of like a snowmobile or wave-runner is. So I could see owning one if I was 80 or so.

On the other hand, this looks bad-ass! It has a few more horses, but more importantly, it doesn't pretend to be a motorcycle.

Monday, May 26, 2008

If San Francisco values mean carrying my own reusable bags to the grocery store instead of using paper bags or plastic bags that choke up recycling machines, and never having to decide which environmentally damaging option is worse, the I'll take San Francisco values.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

We don't have time to be crybabies about this. The talk on the presidential campaign trail about "hope" has its purpose. We cannot afford to remain befuddled and demoralized. But we must understand that hope is not something applied externally. Real hope resides within us. We generate it -- by proving that we are competent, earnest individuals who can discern between wishing and doing, who don't figure on getting something for nothing and who can be honest about the way the universe really works.

James Howard Kunstler is the author, most recently, of "World Made by Hand," a novel about America's post-oil future.